In Memoriam
by Mengde
Summary: Only Vincent knows how he lost his memory. Too bad he can’t remember. He seeks out Yuffie, but in the absence of his inhibitions she finds that her feelings for him are divided. Is he really Vincent if he’s missing everything that makes him who he is?
1. I: Edge

Hello everyone, Mengde here. I don't own FFVII and so forth, but I do like to write about it. I'm calling this piece In Memoriam, and it's going to be relatively short - 4 to 5 chapters of about this length. However, short does not mean bad, so I urge you to read on if you like Vincent and Yuffie. Anyone who is familiar with some of my other work should take note that this will have a different tone (softer, more muted) and pacing (slower) than other pieces by me. Adrenalin-inducing action is best searched for elsewhere. As a side note, anyone who is wondering about Twilight of Spira (I flatter myself) may rest assured that it will continue after I've given this its run. Without further ado, then...

* * *

**In Memoriam**

**Written by Mengde **

He did not know who he was.

There was a house, and there was a woman in the house, and he knew that he had to get to this house to see this woman. Why he needed to get there and how he knew where to go he had no idea. It was the only thing on his mind, a driving instinct that surpassed the rational bounds of thought. One might as well have asked a bird why it flew south during the winter. Its answer would be no more illuminating than any this man could give about his purpose.

In the back of his mind he knew that he should eat and drink, even though he didn't feel like he needed to. He had been walking for days, through mountains and forests and rivers. Then he had hit a wall, one that was composed of water and stretched beyond the point where his eyes could see.

He'd found a boat, one that could carry him across the ocean, and he had hidden away on it. He'd had a feeling his appearance would not sit well with anyone on board. The accoutrements he found himself wearing were strange: pointed brass boots, a red cloak, and most fearsome of all, an enormous brass segmented gauntlet that encased the entirety of his left arm. The arm itself was normal, and he wondered why he wore the gauntlet, but it seemed wrong to throw it away, so he kept it on.

He also had a massive, triple-barreled handgun. It was loaded and the safety was on. He didn't want to contemplate precisely why he carried such a weapon.

The boat had taken him across the ocean to another continent, and he knew this one was the right one, that the woman and the woman's house were here. He started heading north. Sometimes he stumbled and his vision swam, but he pressed on. He didn't sleep.

His head hurt.

Nothing was familiar, but he knew where he was going. Nobody could say that he lacked focus, but that was essentially the only thing of which he had no lack. It would have made for a frustrating conundrum if he had wanted to reflect on his situation at all.

Night fell, and it began to rain. He pressed on, knowing that he was drawing near to his destination. Lightning split the sky and the wind howled, but he kept going. He had to make it tonight or he might never make it at all.

"Almost there," he muttered. His voice sounded alien, a deep, sonorous sound that bore no significance to him beyond the fact that it was coming out of his own throat.

There was a city in front of him, a huge, bright city full of people and lights. Slowly it rose up around him as he stumbled through the outskirts and suburbs, but he never stopped to consider where he should head next. He always headed unerringly in whatever direction he deemed to feel right, knowing that it would lead him to the house with the woman in it.

Suddenly he rounded a corner and there it was. He simultaneously recognized the house and realized that it had no significance to him. This was where he needed to go, but he had no idea why. It didn't matter right now, though. All that mattered was that he go up to the front door and knock.

He rapped several times and then stood back. A quaking unexpectedly took hold of his frame, and he felt his knees buckle. He knew he was supposed to be stronger than this. He broke out in a sweat. What was wrong with him?

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" a voice floated down from the floor above. "Just a sec!"

Was that the voice of the woman? It had to be. He didn't recognize it. Could he have come to the wrong house? He was certain that this was the one. He just knew it on a completely ineffable and unquestionable level.

The door opened. Framed in the light emanating from within the house was a surprised-looking young woman, who couldn't be a day over twenty. She was dressed in a rather flattering nightgown, had short black hair and grey eyes, and a short, supple frame.

"Vincent?" she asked.

"Who's that?" he replied before his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed into her arms.

* * *

"So… what's wrong with him?" Yuffie asked.

She stood with Reeve outside the medical ward that Vincent was being kept in. As soon as Vincent had shown up on her doorstep and passed out, she'd called up Reeve and told him to dispatch an emergency medical team. It was a good thing that Vincent had come to her house in Edge. If she'd been in Wutai, there would have been no way to get a WRO trauma team on the scene in time.

"Aside from having exerted himself far beyond even his unique capacity, we can't really say," the doctor told her. "We've examined him, but as you know, his physiology is only human in a cursory sense. As far as we can tell, his body appears to be functioning normally. His brain is a different story. He's suffered some kind of massive head trauma from an indeterminate source and it seems, as you say, to have affected his memory. We did a scan and got all sorts of bizarre readings. If there was someone else like him we'd do another scan to compare these results to, but…"

"There isn't anyone else like Vincent," Reeve finished for the doctor. "He's unique."

"Precisely. I am sorry, but we've done all we can. It just remains for him to get hydrated and get some rest. Maybe his memory will return in time, or with stimulation. I'm really not qualified to make such an assessment."

"Nobody is," Yuffie murmured. "Not anymore."

* * *

The next morning, Yuffie's heart leaped into her throat with hope. She'd entered Vincent's ward and he'd immediately sat up in bed, a look of recognition on his face.

Her hope was immediately dashed. "You're the woman from last night!" he said. "Who are you? Where am I? For that matter, who am I?"

"You don't remember me, Vincent?" she asked, crestfallen.

He cocked his head. "Is that my name?" he asked her. "Vincent?"

She managed a nod. "Yes. Vincent Valentine. That's your name. I'm –" her voice caught in her throat for a moment – "Yuffie Kisaragi."

"I suppose it's good to make your acquaintance, then," Vincent said to her. "I'm feeling much better."

Yuffie motioned at the IV drip inserted into Vincent's arm. "We've had you on the tube since we got you here last night. You sure came a long way to find me."

Vincent relaxed back into the pillow on his bed. "I guess I did at that."

"If you don't remember who I am or even who you are, how'd you know where to find me?"

His expression became contemplative. "It was the strangest feeling. I knew precisely where I needed to go. I knew that there was a house I had to get to, and that there was a woman in that house that I needed to see." He turned his head to look at her again. "I suppose you're that woman."

"What's the last thing you remember, Vincent?"

"Walking. I remember walking a long way, day and night, not stopping. They're not very vivid memories, just long stretches of time blending together." She had to stop herself from taking a step forward when he added, "And before that I remember waking up and not knowing who I was."

Yuffie cleared her throat. "The doctor – the doctor said that your head had been hurt. He wasn't sure how. You don't remember that?"

"I only remember it hurting throughout the journey." Vincent held up his left arm and looked at it. "I also remember being dressed differently than this."

"I'm sure the doctor knows where your stuff's been stashed," Yuffie told him. "Don't worry. Once you're good to go again we'll get your stuff back and things'll get back to normal, I promise."

"You shouldn't make promises that you can't keep," Vincent said.

The penetrating insight behind the words startled Yuffie. She almost thought that Vincent's memory had suddenly come back, made a resurgence. He sounded like himself again. "Why do you say that?"

His ruby eyes met her grey ones. "You were lying," he said. "I could tell."

"Vincent, I'm only telling you what I hope will happen," Yuffie said, feeling the blood rushing to her face. He always had been able to tell when people were lying. "I just meant that –"

"You. Were. Lying," he cut her off. "You're just trying to convince yourself that it'll work out that way. The reality is possibly quite different. Don't neglect that."

She managed a calm nod, just one, before turning around and walking out of the ward. Closing the door behind her, she saw that Vincent had more visitors – Cloud and Barret both waited outside.

"How is he?" Cloud asked.

"He's still Vincent," Yuffie replied, silently vowing not to cry in front of her friends. "Even if he doesn't know it."

* * *

"Favorite color?" Tifa tried.

"Can't remember," Vincent replied around a mouthful of hospital food. Tifa had been hungry when she'd arrived. After catching a whiff of the stuff they were serving Vincent, she no longer had an appetite. How he managed to eat it with a straight face was beyond her.

"Birthday?" The chair that she had pulled up next to his bed was uncomfortable.

"Can't remember."

"What caliber is your handgun?"

"The huge silver thing with three barrels? No idea, but if I had it in front of me I could tell."

"Multiplication tables?"

"Up to thirty. I've already told everyone else who's asked, I can remember basic things but not anything specific about myself." Vincent finished the food and set it on the table next to his bed. "The only things about me that I remember are elementary knowledge, simple things. I can speak at least four different languages. I know I'm trained in at least intermediate-level first aid. I know I'm also a combat expert."

Tifa raised an eyebrow. "How do you know these things?"

"I could tell you what I'm telling you now in Wutainese, Gongagan, or Tradespeak. When I woke up this morning and had a chance to look around I recognized all of the equipment in this room and knew instinctively what it did and how to operate it. When I look at you, or anyone else, I know precisely how to kill you." He cast his gaze down at the sheets and added, "Not that I want to. But the knowledge is there."

Tifa nodded. "And you don't remember any of us?"

Vincent's gaze wandered over to the window, which provided an excellent view of Edge, situated as they were on one of the top floors of the WRO Tower. "No. No, I don't."

Nothing was said for a minute. Tifa got up and brushed herself off. "Well, I need to be going. I just thought I'd check up on you." She paused on her way over to the door. "You hurt Yuffie's feelings last night, or so I'm told. You might want to apologize."

"Yuffie…?" Vincent asked. "Oh. Her. I didn't mean to."

"You never did mean to," Tifa said. "You still ended up apologizing."

There was nothing else to be said, really, so Tifa saw herself out. Vincent watched her go and returned to gazing out the window.

He'd at least gleaned another bit of knowledge about himself from this exchange. The thought of apologizing to Yuffie seemed familiar somehow, in a burdensome kind of way. He had a twofold feeling: that he did this a lot, and that he was not very good at it.

* * *

The next day, the doctors declared that Vincent was well enough to leave, and that he should get back out into the world and try to rediscover some of himself. There was nothing they could do for him in that regard.

Yuffie watched him take aim with Cerberus at a target about twenty-five meters away. They were outside Edge, in an area that Cloud liked to call his "practice zone." It was a dry, rocky area, littered with target dummies and other pitfalls that Cloud had set up as a kind of obstacle course. Yuffie had perched herself on a particularly high rock so she could watch Vincent.

Vincent fired and the target had a new hole in it. He shook his head. "Too easy." He turned around and sighted on a target that had to be at least forty meters away. The report sounded and Yuffie could just make out the perfect headshot that Vincent had scored.

"You didn't forget how to shoot," she observed.

"It's strange," Vincent said. "Like I have a third eye in my forehead. It just seems natural and entirely too easy." He reloaded Cerberus with a practiced ease, handling the massive gun like it weighed nothing, before switching on the safety and holstering the weapon. "All of it's too easy. I feel like I should be clumsy and a poor shot, but I'm quite the opposite."

(And Tifa tells me you also remember how to speak Wutainese,) Yuffie added in her native language.

(As though I was born speaking it,) Vincent replied. "What kind of person was I, Yuffie?"

"A pain in the ass," Yuffie said. "And a good guy to have watching your back."

"You seem more familiar to me than the others in… AVALANCHE," Vincent observed, remembering the word after searching for a moment. "Besides the fact that you were the person I felt I had to get to, there's more."

"Like what?"

Vincent shrugged. "I don't have any memories of the two of us. It's more like I look at you and I remember an emotion. Think back to a time when you were angry, or sad, or happy, and just remember the feeling, not the event. That's what it's like."

Yuffie closed her eyes and tried to find an appropriate memory. The first thing that came to mind was the moment after Omega WEAPON was destroyed. She felt a rush of exultation, followed by a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach accompanied by mounting dread when she realized that she could see no sign of Vincent anywhere at all, nowhere –

"Whoa!"

Apparently Yuffie had perched herself less securely than she'd initially thought, because she lost her balance and started tumbling towards the ground. Vincent immediately leaped towards her, desperately trying to catch her and knowing that he wasn't fast enough. He stopped short and blinked several times in surprise when Yuffie did a mid-air recovery and landed easily on her feet.

"Are you all right?"

Yuffie scoffed. "I'm the Great Ninja Yuffie, Vincent. Did you forget who you're talk- " She broke off in midsentence as what she was saying hit her. She clapped her hands over her mouth in horror, or at least embarrassed shock.

"Yes," he replied.

Slowly, Yuffie withdrew her hands from her mouth. Both of them just stared at one another for a moment until Yuffie said, "Vincent…"

He cleared his throat. Something in his mind told him that now was the proper time.

"I'm sorry!" they both blurted out at once.

Yuffie cocked her head at him. "What? Why are you apologizing too?"

Vincent ran a hand down his face in embarrassment. His feeling had apparently been correct – he was terrible at apologizing. The proper time, his foot. "I was told – Tifa, that's who told me – that I hurt your feelings," he rambled quickly. "And I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, and I hope you aren't too upset." He shut up and held his breath, hoping he didn't look too pathetic.

"No big deal," Yuffie said, trying to pass off nonchalantly what had to be the most heartbreaking thing she'd seen in ages. "I just stuck my foot in my mouth too, so what say we call it even?"

"Okay." Vincent let himself breathe again. She didn't hate him. That was good news. He wondered why this was so difficult and why he felt it was so important to gain the approval of this woman – girl, even – but couldn't find any satisfactory conclusions. "So you're a ninja?"

"Best one there ever was," Yuffie replied proudly. "One time, a couple years ago, I was traveling with this bunch of fools, right? We got within ten miles of Wutai – do you remember where Wutai is?"

"Yes. I remember where it is, just not anything about it."

"We got within ten miles of Wutai, which is where I'm from, and I stole all their Materia right out from under their noses!" Yuffie said. "That had to be my greatest moment."

"Really," Vincent said. "What ended up happening to this band of fools?"

"I gave them back their Materia out of pity, they were so helpless without it," Yuffie snickered. "And they were so thankful they begged me to stay even though I'd stolen all their stuff!" She paused in her embellishment of the tale and looked at the genuine expression of mirth on Vincent's face. There was something she hadn't seen in a long time, if ever.

It reminded her of the smirk he'd worn, visible even when she'd been tied to that damn statue of Da Chao. He'd had it when he'd addressed Don Corneo during the incident she was busily restructuring for his amusement. "I don't care about what you're doing," he'd said to the fat man, "so much as the idiotic way you are doing it."

"That's very interesting," he said. "A little hard to believe, though."

Yuffie molded her expression into one of appropriate shock. "You're calling me a liar? Vincent, you just apologized for hurting my feelings once today already!"

"I'm not trying to hurt your feelings," he said, and suddenly that same smirk appeared on his features. "Just prove that you're that good by getting this gun off of my hip."

Yuffie eyed Cerberus, secure in its holster at Vincent's waist. "I don't know if you're going to be enough of a challenge," she said, "for me to –"

In midsentence she sprang at him, fingers going for the gun. He easily swerved out of the way, reading her without effort. She doubled back and went for it again, and he whirled away, cloak fluttering. "I must be a ninja too," he observed, still smirking.

Yuffie picked up the pace, going at him faster and faster, but he dodged and weaved around erratically, always moving just out of reach of her grasping fingers. Yuffie frowned. She couldn't let herself get beat now that this was a matter of honor. Time for desperate measures.

Instead of going for the gun, Yuffie leaped in a full-on tackle straight at Vincent. He stared, surprised, for a split-second too long, and took Yuffie's tackle in the gut. She bowled him over and he landed hard on his back. He didn't seem to notice – his right hand immediately moved to protect Cerberus, while he pulled his left arm farther away from her, obviously afraid of accidentally scoring her with it.

Vincent's eyes widened when Yuffie sprang off of him a moment later. He felt Cerberus slip out from under his fingers – Cerberus, and his belt, holster and all.

"Gotcha," Yuffie sniggered. She held the article of clothing aloft like a trophy. "Am I right, or am I right?"

Vincent got to his feet, right hand making sure his pants didn't go anywhere, and extended his free hand to her so she could give back his belt. "I suppose you're right," he admitted. "You are a ninja."

She nodded and gave him a small curtsy with surprising grace before putting his belt back in his hand. "Thanks for saying so."

He took a minute to get himself readjusted. "Yuffie?" he asked.

"What?"

"This band of fools," he said. "Am I one of them?"

Yuffie felt the grin slowly slide off of her face. He looked so sincere, buckling up his belt and asking her about the life that no longer existed for him. He barely looked like Vincent at all.

"Yeah," she told him quietly. "You are."


	2. II: The Cargo Boat

"How old am I?"

Yuffie looked at Vincent and tried to conceal her dismay. He sat across the table from her in Tifa's bar. The two of them were having breakfast, and for some reason he felt that this was a good time to drop this question on her. His gaze was fixed on his eggs.

How was she supposed to tell him? She didn't exactly know, for one. He'd once told her that he'd been twenty-seven when Hojo had modified him, but that was an indeterminate number of years ago. He had to be somewhere around sixty, she thought.

"Yuffie?" Vincent asked. "Do you know?"

She swallowed and shrugged. "I can't say for sure, Vincent. You already know that you're not exactly human."

"That much is clear."

"You used to be, though. You got… changed… when you were twenty-seven. That was decades ago. You're probably around sixty now."

"Sixty…" He poked at his eggs with his fork and then set the utensil down before pushing away the plate, still looking at his food. "What made me this way, Yuffie? What did I do with my life after it happened? What kind of person am I?" His tone was reserved, as seemed to be the norm with him even when he had no memories, but there was a coloring to it that sounded almost pleading.

"You're a great person, Vincent," Yuffie insisted. "You're smart, and brave, and selfless, and funny – well, not intentionally funny, you're actually so stoic that it's funny – you're just good, that's all," she finished lamely. "You don't get along that well with people, and you don't like to talk much, but you're a good guy underneath it all, and I –"

"You what?" Vincent asked when she stopped herself from going any further.

"Nothing important," Yuffie quickly lied and laid into her eggs again, hoping he wouldn't notice. He did, obviously, from the way his brow furrowed, but he chose not to say anything in favor of just sitting silently for a long minute. Then he asked, "What about my other questions?"

"Those… those aren't as easy to answer, to be honest," she said. "There's just so much involved, and – it'd be easier to show you."

He arched an eyebrow, but still did not look up. "Show me? Show me how?"

"We can go to the place where it all happened. Maybe it'll jog your memory, or however that sort of thing works." Yuffie finished off her eggs and added, "What do you think? Maybe it could work."

"I don't know," Vincent replied. "I know as much about my condition as you do, so your guess is as good as mine. But if you think that going to where whatever happened to me took place is a good idea, I can't argue with you. I feel as though I need to know."

Yuffie nodded energetically, trying to inject some cheer back into the conversation, and grinned at him. "All right, we'll have a little road trip. I hate airships, so if you don't mind, we'll go by land and sea."

"This place is on another continent?" Vincent asked. "Could it be the one that I came from?"

"You got here from a different continent?" Yuffie said, surprised.

"I vaguely remember stowing away on some kind of boat to cross an ocean. I couldn't tell you anything more than that."

"Well, it could be, then. There's a cargo ship that we'll have to take to get across the ocean if we don't want to fly, and that could be what you stowed away on if you came from the Central Continent."

"Where are we going, exactly?"

Yuffie hesitated and then said, "A little town called Nibelheim."

Vincent straightened up a bit and his eyes narrowed, looking just past her head. "That name… it bears some kind of familiarity. I know about it, where it's situated, that is, but when you brought it to the forefront of my mind I felt something."

She looked at him. "I bet you did, Vincent."

* * *

Vincent watched, concerned, as Yuffie vomited over the railing of the cargo ship. "I'm sorry," he said.

She gasped a bit for breath and then asked, "For what? The fact that I get seasick, airsick, and carsick as well as regular-sick? Not your fault."

"I just feel sorry for you is all," Vincent insisted. "I know it's not my fault." He winced as she threw up again. "Maybe lunch wasn't such a good idea."

"I can eat nothing for days before coming onto one of these ships and I'll still throw up the water I drank," Yuffie told him. "Nothing anybody can do. I just have to tough it out and deal with it." She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped at her mouth, then with an expression of mild disgust let the cloth go over the side. "After the first bout I can usually take a tranquilizer and be fine for the rest of the trip, provided I don't eat anything more substantial than soup."

He looked pained and seemed to take interest in his feet. "The trip's going to take the rest of the day and a bit of tomorrow, or at least that's what the captain says, and I'm sure that a ship like this isn't going to offer any soup."

"I'll be fine. I told you I've tried eating nothing for days before stuff like this, you think a day and change is going to faze me?"

"All right, all right," he capitulated.

Yuffie leaned against the railing of the ship and gave him a mischievous smile. "This isn't like you, Vincent. Being concerned and nice and everything. You never made a big deal of me puking before."

"Is it not like me? I wouldn't know."

"I like it." She breezed past him and said, "Let's look at our quarters. I'm hoping they're not too small."

Vincent took a moment to finish processing her liking his concern before he blinked and turned around. "Right."

* * *

"Small" was something of an understatement. The captain had been more than happy to give them both a ride across the ocean for free, considering they were both somewhat renowned – even if Vincent didn't remember anything he was renowned for, exactly – but he had little to offer in the way of good accommodations.

Their quarters consisted of one room, with one bed in it, set against the far wall, and a small bathroom that had a toilet and a sink in it and nothing else. A small porthole in the wall above the bed began and ended the other furnishings. Beyond that, the room was bare. Vincent didn't have anything in his possession other than the clothes on his back and his gun, so Yuffie had packed clothes for both of them. Her suitcase, which was only about half as big as she was, took up an entire corner of the bedroom area.

"Cozy," Yuffie said.

"Cramped," Vincent said.

"Rustic."

"Rusty."

"Be positive!" she reprimanded him.

"Fine," he deadpanned. "We can sleep together in a very small and uncomfortable room. Hooray."

"You're no fun." Yuffie walked over to the bed and sat down on it hard enough to bounce up and down a few times before she settled. "Besides, what're you saying, huh? Am I just that disgusting that you can't share a room with me? I see how it is."

"I wasn't saying that," Vincent replied a bit too hastily for his own liking. "It's just that… you feel familiar to me, and I would say that even after only a few days of my 'knowing' you we're friends, but don't you think this could be a little awkward?"

"No," she said perkily, getting off of the bed. "Now you go outside for a minute. I'm going to brush my teeth and change into something more comfortable."

Vincent obligingly stepped outside and walked over to the railing to look out at the sea. The world was unfamiliar to him, a mass of names and locations that he knew but knew nothing about, but the ocean seemed to be beyond that. He looked down at the foam being kicked up by the cargo boat's passage. It seemed to him as though everything he knew – his combat expertise, his geographical knowledge, all the other facts and skills he possessed – were foam on the top of a deep, impenetrable ocean that held the rest of who he was. He needed to dive deeper, beneath the surface, to figure out precisely what Vincent Valentine was like.

"Done!" a voice said from behind him.

Vincent turned around and was confronted with Yuffie wearing a white sun dress with a neckline and hemline that were both just a bit too short of modest to be unintentional. She also had on a pair of oversized sunglasses and in one hand she gripped a pair of collapsed folding chairs. In the other she held a bottle of sunscreen.

"Where did you get those things?" Vincent asked, purposefully avoiding the topic of her choice of clothes and concentrating on the folding chairs.

"I packed them," Yuffie replied brightly. "They fit in the suitcase. I figured we'd be on the ocean, and this boat goes straight to Costa Del Sol, so I planned ahead."

"I thought you said you packed clothes for both of us in there. Those chairs wouldn't leave much room for clothes."

"They didn't. I laid out yours for you. Go and change, you must be hot in all those layers."

Vincent had to admit that the sun was rather high in the sky, and its reflecting off of the ocean wasn't helping. He shrugged and walked back to their quarters.

He emerged some time later looking distinctly unhappy. Yuffie, who had by now set up the chairs on the deck – much to the chagrin of the majority of the sailors for whom the last thing they needed was to be distracted while on shift – stopped applying sunscreen to her arms to turn and look at Vincent.

"Good, they fit!" she exclaimed. "I was afraid the shirt would be big on you."

Vincent sat stiffly in the chair next to her. He was wearing a brilliantly-colored Aloha shirt patterned with beach scenes from Costa Del Sol, a loose-fitting set of tan shorts that ran to just above his knees, and sandals. He looked very pale and somewhat miserable.

"I don't think I like this attire very much," he finally said after a minute.

"It's vacation wear!" Yuffie chided him. "Nothing to be embarrassed about or anything. Now cheer up!"

"I know that," Vincent said, "but at the same time, it feels… wrong. Uncomfortable, even."

"You've been wearing the clothes I had you change out of for nobody knows how long, of course it's going to feel weird to wear something else," Yuffie told him. "Now stop bitching. I think you look good in them. Even if you have pale, skinny legs."

Vincent felt himself blanch a bit. Were his legs that pale? He looked at them, then snuck a look at Yuffie's legs, which she was busily applying sunscreen to. He told himself he was interested purely for comparative reasons. At a glance, she was a good deal tanner than he was, and he sighed.

"I might start charging you if you keep staring at them like that, Vincent," Yuffie told him.

He jerked his gaze up to her face, then away and down to her shoulder. "I was just wondering if my legs really were that pale," he replied stiffly.

"Would I lie to you? They are. It doesn't matter, though." Yuffie finished screening herself and closed the bottle, setting it down next to her. "Though, to be honest, I'm not sure if you tan at all. You might have to just get used to having white legs, Vincent."

They sat in silence and gazed out at the sea for a while before Vincent spoke again. "Yuffie, did we ever do anything like this together? Going on trips?"

"Depends on what you mean by that. We saved the world together, I guess. We kicked a lot of bad guy ass together. Have we ever sat on a boat and tanned together? No, we haven't."

Vincent stared at his legs again and twitched his equally-white toes. "I like it."

She smiled at him. "Good."

* * *

The rest of the day had been uneventful. Dinner had been served and eaten, Yuffie had thrown it up, and the ship had slowly quieted down and the night shift had taken over.

Yuffie had returned the folding chairs to the suitcase and then pulled out sets of pajamas for herself and Vincent. The nightshirt and pants Yuffie provided were far too small on Vincent, but he preferred them to any other modes of dress from which he might choose to sleep in. For her part, Yuffie wore a matching set of pink pajamas, which she made Vincent compliment before they settled in for the night.

Now Vincent stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. He lay on his back, stiff as a board, on the far right side of the bed. An inch more and he would fall off at the slightest push. His mouth tasted vaguely of toothpaste.

From the sound of Yuffie's breathing, he guessed that she was fast asleep. She was curled up on the left side of the bed, managing to take up considerably more room than he was, but he didn't mind. He would have felt guilty if she had needed to accommodate him instead of the other way around.

In the past few days, Vincent had found that he had no trouble getting to sleep. Tonight was an exception, however, and it obviously had everything to do with the woman sleeping peacefully a few inches to his left.

Why was she so familiar to him? Why had he been compelled to find her, at any cost, after he lost his memory? He knew she couldn't have had anything to do with it; if she had, he would have been able to detect it by now. She was genuinely concerned about him and wanted to help him. What had he done to elicit such caring from her? He wished that he could remember, and he even concentrated as hard as he could, but nothing came to him. The depths of his mind stubbornly refused to become clear to him.

Vincent sighed and shut his eyes. If he just kept them closed he would eventually fall asleep.

Only a few minutes had passed and Vincent was no closer to sleep when he heard a faint whimpering sound. He opened his eyes and glanced at Yuffie, who was curling into an even tighter ball and making small, frightened noises in her throat. He felt a sense of acute pity come over him, but at the same time he was stricken by indecision. Was she having a nightmare? If so, should he wake her up? He could tell that he had no experience with this kind of thing.

The noises she was making increased in intensity, and Vincent caved in and lightly touched her on the shoulder. "Yuffie," he whispered. "Yuffie, wake up."

She gave a small shudder and her breath stopped for a moment. "Vincent," she said matter-of-factly. "What's the matter?"

"I thought you were having a nightmare," he said, feeling stupid already. "So I woke you up."

Yuffie rolled over, putting her face too close to Vincent's for him to be entirely comfortable – not that he had been comfortable to begin with. "Thanks," she said. "I would have woken up by myself, though. There wasn't any need to bother."

"I was awake already," Vincent said, trying to keep his gaze fixed on the ceiling. A bit of moonlight shone into the room through the porthole, illuminating the curve of her body and highlighting her hair, which fell in lazy strands about her face. He could see all this in his peripheral vision and knew that if he looked right at her he wasn't going to be looking away again anytime soon.

"Can't sleep, huh?"

"It's nothing," he said. "Really."

She scrutinized him for a little while, and he scrutinized the ceiling. "What do you think of when you look at me?" she finally asked.

He resisted the urge to swallow, which was steadily growing. "Why do you ask?" he said.

"Because you don't look at me," she said.

There was no way he could rebut this, considering that he was pointedly staring at a featureless ceiling instead of her, so he said nothing. Yuffie took that as her cue to continue. "You did at first, but lately you've been avoiding it. I don't pretend to know why, but I'm afraid that I'm causing you pain, or making you feel stupid, or something like that, and I want you to –"

Vincent surrendered to his impulse and swallowed, then turned his head to look her in the eye. She trailed off and fell silent, outlined by the moonlight, looking at him.

"What do you want me to do?" Vincent asked. His voice sounded rough in his own ears.

"To tell me," Yuffie said, her gaze never leaving his, "if that's true."

"No," he replied. "It's not." He felt himself gravitating towards her, centimeter by centimeter. It was inevitable at this point. He'd known what would happen if he looked at her.

"Then what," she asked quietly, "do you think of when you look at me?" 

Her lips were soft, and Vincent felt a small chill travel down his spine as he kissed her. He felt almost unbearably awkward and knew that he had little idea of what he was doing, but couldn't find it within himself to care. Yuffie apparently didn't care either. A faint corner of Vincent's mind hoped that he didn't taste too much like toothpaste as she returned the kiss and slid her tongue past his teeth.

An indeterminate amount of time later – it felt like forever to Vincent, but it was probably no more than thirty seconds – she withdrew, just enough to break the kiss. "I think," he said, "that you know what I think about when I look at you."

"And that's why you haven't been?" Yuffie asked.

"I didn't think it was a good idea," Vincent told her. "I feel drawn to you, more than could be attributed to normal attraction, but I don't know why. There's something going on that I don't understand."

"I think," Yuffie said, "that you should worry less, and do what feels right."

He kissed her again. It felt right.


	3. III: Nibelheim

"I feel as though I've been here before."

With no small amount of reticence evident on her face, Yuffie regarded Vincent as they stood just outside the entrance to the small town of Nibelheim. He stood ramrod-straight, hand resting uneasily on the butt of his gun, as he stared intently past all the buildings in the town. His gaze was fixed on the looming, gloomy edifice of the Shin-Ra mansion.

"You have been," Yuffie said quietly. "You've spent most of your life here."

Vincent swept around to ask her, "Doing what? What was my profession? Where did I live? How did I support myself? Did I have a family?"

Not wanting to proceed but knowing that this was her idea and she was bound to it at this point, Yuffie pointed to the mansion. "All your answers are in there."

He followed the direction of her finger and returned his gaze to the building, then sighed and started to walk forward into the town. Without thinking about it, Yuffie reached forward and grabbed Vincent by the cloak, stopping him in his tracks. "What's the matter?" he demanded.

"I want…" Yuffie started, then trailed off, not sure how to put her thoughts into words. She raised her head and found his eyes, simultaneously so beautiful and terrible. She could read the concern in them. Even though he stood on the brink of what could change his life as he knew it, he was still worried for her.

"No matter what happens or what you remember, I want you to promise me something," Yuffie told him.

"What?"

"Even if you change completely and don't feel anything for me anymore, I don't want you to stop looking at me," she said, feeling stupid even as the words left her mouth. "That way I can think back to these last few days and remember them."

Vincent frowned and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "I'm not going to stop having feelings for you," he told her. "If I feel this way about you even without a memory or a past, how could I feel differently if I regain those things?"

"I can't explain it without showing you what's inside that mansion," Yuffie said. "But just promise, okay? I'm not used to asking for favors."

His expression softened and he pulled her into a brief, gentle embrace. "I promise," he said.

"Good!" Yuffie exclaimed, forcing herself to brighten up now that she had what she wanted, even if it was fleeting and might ultimately prove useless. "Let's go, then!"

They proceeded through the town. People looked up from their daily tasks and stared at the strangers, both of whom they recognized as members of AVALANCHE but did not know personally. Vincent felt their eyes on him and had to work to keep his gaze on the mansion until Yuffie took his hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

The gates to the Shin-Ra mansion were rusted and looked quite worse for the wear. Yuffie knew for a fact that Vincent hadn't been here since the Deepground Crisis, and she doubted that anyone bothered to maintain the building. When the right gate refused to open, Vincent gave it a solid yank and pulled it straight off of its hinges. He let it clatter to the ground and swept on through towards the front door, heedless of the fact that now almost everyone in Nibelheim had gathered a good distance away to watch the two of them make their entrance. Yuffie looked at the discarded gate and gave the left one an experimental tug. It didn't budge, and she wondered if Vincent realized just how strong he really was.

Vincent hesitated at the front doors of the mansion, feeling bombarded with a sense of familiarity. It was almost the same level as the sense he got when he looked at Yuffie. Could he have lived in this decrepit mansion? How long had it been since he had inhabited it? If he was rich enough to own such a place, why could he not afford staff? For that matter, why had he ended up staggering half-dead, with nothing but the clothes on his back, across continents to find Yuffie? Could he have been attacked?

He threw open the doors and stepped inside.

It was dim and musty and did not have the feeling of a place that had been lived in. He heard skittering somewhere nearby and knew that there had to be vermin and monsters lurking within. What kind of place was this?

"How could I have spent most of my life here?" he asked, somewhat dismayed.

"You spent it… sleeping," Yuffie said.

Vincent turned and looked at her outlined in the doorway, looking sad and very small. "What?"

"You spent about thirty years in some kind of hibernation," Yuffie explained. "There's a secret passage that I'll show you that leads to the basement of this mansion. You were asleep there when we found you."

"Why… why was I asleep?" Vincent asked. "Who did that to me?"

She looked like her heart was breaking, but she forced herself to speak anyway. "You did, Vincent."

Vincent couldn't wrap his mind around it. What kind of past did he have? "Show me," he said. "Please."

Yuffie took him by the hand and led him up the winding staircase to the second floor. They kicked up dust as they moved and the steps creaked beneath their feet. On the second floor Yuffie brushed past the huge windows set into the back wall of the mansion and kept going, while Vincent stared at the mansion's rear yard, an overgrown mass of weeds and shrubs through which ran a small stream. They moved through a bedroom and came to a seemingly blank wall made from roughly-hewn bricks of grey stone. Without even having to search for it, Yuffie pressed a particular brick in and the wall slid aside, revealing a descending spiral staircase.

Darkness seemed to spill out of the opening like blood from a wound, though Vincent assumed it was just a feeling of tension that made him think that. He found he was only half-right when he thought to look down at his feet and see pitch-black gouts of what looked like mist swirling around them. Unnerved, he gave a small kick at the fog, which parted like any ordinary gas but lingered afterwards.

"This is where I slept?" he asked.

"Yeah," Yuffie said. Rather than unnerved or tense, she merely looked sad. Vincent started forward, but she caught him and pulled him into a kiss, to which he relented after but a moment's surprise. There was a metallic tang in her mouth, and when he drew away from her he saw twin streaks of water running down her face. He pulled back, embarrassed, but Yuffie moved with him. "No worries," she said briskly, wiping at her face. "I'm just a little on edge, that's all. The anticipation."

"Of course," Vincent said, turning to look at the oozing blackness of the staircase.

"The anticipation."

--

Their descent into the basement of the mansion was brief. Yuffie conjured a small, twinkling ball of flame with a Fire materia she had on hand, which cast enough light for them to see by. Still, the light did not extend far, and the darkness seemed to eat and worry at its edges, as though it wanted to attack the two of them.

They got to the bottom of the staircase and were presented with a long tunnel. At least, Vincent assumed it was long; it was impossible to see through the inky blackness past the globe of light Yuffie was generating, something that he suspected he would ordinarily have no problem doing.

"It doesn't feel right down here," he said. "This darkness doesn't seem natural."

"It's not," Yuffie said. "I didn't expect it to be like this. Something's wrong."

They proceeded cautiously down the tunnel, which seemed impossibly long in the pitch blackness that surrounded them. Yuffie felt along the wall even with the light, needing a sense of solidity to keep her going in the right direction. Suddenly her hand fell upon metal rather than stone, and there it was: the door.

"What's this?" Vincent asked, looking at the door.

"Where you slept," Yuffie said. She tested the doorknob and found it locked. "You mind opening it for me?"

Vincent also tested the doorknob, then gave a sudden, sharp heave and ripped it right out of its metal housing. The door swung slowly open as though of its own accord, and the both of them peered inside.

It was a largish room, hewn out of the living rock, with several wooden, broken coffins scattered about in the rear, which was just barely visible. The two of them quickly forgot about those coffins, though, because a large, black-lacquered coffin with a cross engraved on its face lay in the center of the room, and the darkness was literally seeping out of it.

"This is where I slept?" Vincent asked, unnerved.

"This mist was never here before," Yuffie said, alarmed. "Vincent, how long has it been since you've been back here?" She only remembered the futility of asking the question after it had been voiced, and she winced. "Sorry."

"Forget it." Vincent cautiously stepped into the room and prodded the coffin with one of his boots. Nothing happened; the mist continued to seep from under the lid and dead silence reigned.

He moved to open it and Yuffie quickly stepped in front of him, shaking her head. "Bad idea. Not just opening that, but all of this. Coming here was a bad idea. What was I thinking?" She laughed nervously. "We should just head back up to the surface and forget we ever came here. How about it, Vincent?"

"I need to know, Yuffie." Vincent gently moved her aside. "Whatever's going on here must have some connection to why I lost my memory. We need to figure out what it is so I can regain my past."

Yuffie's expression crumpled momentarily before she gave a small shudder and was calm again. "You're right, Vincent. We can't ignore this." She turned to look at the coffin, the Fire materia clutched in her hand. "We can't pretend that everything is fine and never come back. That'd just be closing our eyes to the truth." Circling to the other side of the coffin, she put her free hand on its lid. "We'll do it together."

Vincent nodded and he also put his hand on the coffin's lid. They gazed at one another for a long moment; then they gave a great heave and sent the lid flying.

Pure darkness boiled out of the coffin like an impossibly thick swarm of angry insects. It was completely soundless, but it filled the entire room and Yuffie felt it wash over and around her before wrapping itself about them like a suffocating blanket. The Fire materia she was holding stopped glowing and the ball of flame she was conjuring died out instantly. She gave a yell, muffled by the darkness, and lunged for Vincent, trying to grab his hand.

Something caught her and she could see again, but it was not Vincent. Yuffie blinked a strange griminess out of her eyes and looked at the hand she was holding, followed it up the arm to the face, and gasped.

Professor Hojo sneered at her. "My, my. That's quite a reaction. Shouldn't you be pleased to see a familiar face?"

Yuffie realized that the darkness was gone, they were still in the same room… but Vincent was missing, all the coffins were stacked neatly in a corner and not smashed or broken up, and where Vincent had been, Hojo stood. "You're supposed to be dead," she said, wrenching her hand out of his grasp and darting back. "How are you here? What have you done with Vincent?"

"I'll deal with your questions one at a time," Hojo drawled in that particularly infuriating manner of his. "Professor Hojo is indeed dead, that is true. I am not him. I'm a sort of simulacrum, fashioned from bits and pieces of Vincent's mind. After all," and here he paused to give her a truly wicked grin, "I did know him very well… inside and out, you might say."

"Sick bastard!" Yuffie snarled and went for her shuriken. Her hand grasped at empty air and it took her a second, as well as looking over her shoulder to see that it wasn't strapped to her back, to realize that it was indeed gone. She whipped her head back around to look at Hojo and was immediately blinded by a powerful light. A sense of vertigo hit her and she realized she was looking up at the light and was lying on a cold, hard metal table. When she tried to move she found her wrists and ankles had been strapped in place.

"I'm here," Hojo continued as though no change of scenery had taken place, "because memories have power." Yuffie could tell that he was circling the table, pacing as he talked, but couldn't see for the light in her eyes, which she had to squeeze shut to avoid being blinded. "Hojo is dead, but I am here, and I can assure you that I am quite real. Simulacrum is a bit of a misleading term." She heard a rustling sound and found that he had moved the light out of her eyes.

She opened them to find that they had moved into the anterior room of the basement. Bookshelves surrounded the table she was strapped to, and Hojo leered down at her from where he stood beside the table. "Tell me, Yuffie, do you know precisely what I did to Vincent when I had him on this table?"

"He never told me," Yuffie replied, pulling at her restraints and finding them too secure and too tight to slip out of. "I just know that you did horrible things to him. You changed him, made him not human any longer. He hates you, you know."

Hojo laughed so hard he had to stagger away from the table and clutch at his gut. "Of COURSE he hates me!" he cried gleefully. "What about me is not despicable, not utterly contemptible and worthy of disdain? I am a disgusting shell of a human being, without moral compunctions or remorse!" He moved back over to the table and lazily ran his eyes up and down Yuffie's body. "Ruthless, you might say."

Yuffie suppressed a shudder. This had to be some kind of illusion, something conjured up by the strange darkness, but everything felt too horribly real to her. Hojo stopped looking at her and began pacing again, continuing. "What I achieved on this table was beyond your comprehension. 'If God did not exist, we would have to create him.'" He whirled and put his face very close to hers. He smelled like disinfectant and Yuffie could see a vein in his forehead throbbing.

"I did that on this table. I created a man capable of attaining godhood. Immortal, nigh indestructible. My foolish assistant Lucrecia instilled him with the power of Chaos and other, lesser beings of the dark followed."

He pulled away and started pacing again, stopping with his back to her. "It was an experiment I could never replicate again. Oh, yes, there was Sephiroth, there were the Deepground lot, there was Genesis and there were all the other SOLDIER fools. All of them had potential, in their ways, but I never could replicate what I did with Vincent. He was different, he was unique." Hojo turned around and there was a mad gleam in his eye that matched the reflection of the light in the blade of the scalpel he now held. "Did you ever see the scars I left on him? Quite extraordinary, some of them."

Yuffie's mouth was dry and she felt her stomach do a flip at the sight of the surgical implement. "Why tell me this?" she rasped.

"Memories inform, don't they?" Hojo replied. He slowly walked towards her, twirling the scalpel casually between his fingers. "When Vincent finally cleansed himself of Chaos and its ilk, emptied out his mind, they returned to the Lifestream where they belonged. But what if they had never been meant to return there?" He drew abreast of the table and stopped, looking down at Yuffie and still twirling the scalpel. "If you liberate something that was never meant to be set free, where does it go to nest?"

Yuffie bit back a hiss as Hojo traced a crimson line across her stomach with his blade. "That blood was never supposed to leave your body," he observed clinically. "If you lose too much of it, you will cease to be who you are now, loosely speaking. Of course, by that I mean you will die, but death is just a detail." This time Yuffie couldn't stop herself from whimpering as he carved another line into her, perpendicularly to the one he cut last and decidedly deeper. "After all, who knows what lies beyond the death of oneself?" Hojo continued. "The incisions are made, the process of exploration can begin, but nothing can take me to where you have gone unless I myself go there."

"But… you're… dead," Yuffie got out through gritted teeth.

"Hojo is dead, not me," Hojo laughed. "I'm the memory, the Hojo that was in Vincent's mind. Or were you not able to surmise what it was that was permeating this place?"

"Vincent's… memories?" Yuffie whispered.

"Vincent HIMSELF!" Hojo roared triumphantly. "Everything that was Vincent Valentine is here, except for the shell that I modified so many years ago that is stumbling around with a life of its own, wondering why it is that you love it!" He gave another long, wheezing cackle and wiped at his brow. "You said yourself that I made Vincent not human. I should say more than human, myself, but as I said, details! Who needs them?" He snapped his fingers and Yuffie heard the door behind her open.

A moment later, she stepped into view. Yuffie blinked and stared uncomprehendingly at herself, dressed in a surgeon's outfit and wearing a blank, hypnotized look on her face. "What…?"

"He had an image of you in his mind as well as one of Hojo," Hojo laughed. "But in this place, this environment, what memory but I should rise to take control? The rest are subordinate to me!" He motioned at Yuffie's double, who reached down below Yuffie's level of vision and came back up with a clear, plastic mask.

It became clear what was happening a moment before the other Yuffie pressed the mask up against Yuffie's face and held it there, despite Yuffie's efforts to worm away and keep it off of her. There was a hissing sound and the edges of her vision began to get blurry. "I may not have moral compunctions," she faintly heard Hojo say, "but I am at the least courteous on occasion, and it will make our work much easier if we can finish our incisions and dissect you without your struggling. Goodbye…"

The world grew hazy and Yuffie felt herself swirling down into blackness. She lost feeling in her limbs first, then her torso, and then she felt nothing at all except a tingling in her lips.

The tingling persisted and she focused on it, trying to grab onto it as a drowning man might grab at a proffered lifeline. She concentrated on it as hard as she could and slowly became aware that the tingling was the feeling of air rushing past her lips in great heaves.

A pressure formed in her chest and faded, then came back twice as hard and faded again, then the tingling resumed. Yuffie realized that she felt as though she was suffocating and tried to breathe, but instead starting coughing violently before she could suck in any air.

She blearily opened her eyes and saw Vincent's concerned face above hers, outlined by a blue sky overhead. A cool breeze whispered past the both of them and Yuffie became aware that she was flat on her back in grass, and Vincent had been giving her mouth-to-mouth.

"I thought I'd lost you," he said, his voice betraying just the tiniest tremor of adrenalin. He pulled her close to him and she clutched at his cloak, taking comfort in the solidity of his body. "When that darkness boiled out of the coffin, your eyes just rolled up into your head and you fainted. I didn't seem to be affected and there was nothing else in there that I could feel, so I grabbed you and got you out here as quickly as I could. Then I realized you weren't breathing, and…"

He trailed off as Yuffie shakily took his face in her hands and kissed him. "I'm all right," she said after she withdrew, clutching at him again. "It's just…"

"What?" Vincent asked.

Yuffie gave him a small, brave smile that concealed the fear roiling inside her. "We may have more problems jogging your memory than we thought."


	4. IV: The Past

"What's the point of trying, you failure? You know that you're not going to make it. Shin-Ra doesn't have any use for weaklings, and that's precisely what you are. I can't believe a pathetic weakling like you even got past the selection process. Just got lucky, didn't you? You're not going to have any luck here!"

The speaker was a giant of a man with a close-shaved head and an ugly grin on his face. The row of recruits, as well as one unseen observer, watched the man easily dodge a flailing swing from the bloodied and disoriented Vincent Valentine.

The two men stood in front of a line of black-suited young men and women, who stared ahead expressionlessly under a harsh light. The big man had picked out Vincent from the line and said that he'd be made an example of.

"It was stupid of you to try to join the Turks!" he laughed. "This is what we do, failure. We will take hold of you and mold you into something deadly, and if you don't survive the process then we don't really care."

"Why me?" Vincent gasped, trying to staunch the flow of blood from his broken nose without much success. The fluid was covering the white lapel of his suit and soaking it through. "Why did you choose to make an example out of me?"

"Here's the fun part," the big man leered. "I was told to pick you out of this line and show you up for the failure that you are. Guess someone up at the top doesn't like you!"

Vincent nodded, slowly, and something in his expression changed. He reset his nose with a horrible cracking sound and straightened up, the panic completely gone from his face.

"How long have you been in the Turks?" he asked calmly.

The big man's grin faltered, but he recovered and boasted, "About a year now."

"Your specialty?"

"What the hell do you think it is? Combat. I'm the strongest current Turk – and that'll just be proven again when I finish with you."

Vincent nodded. "You've been in the Turks for nearly a year, you claim to specialize in combat, and you don't know who I am?"

"Why should I? You're just some pathetic failure who's being made an example of!"

Not seeming to notice the blood running down his face and the bruises forming around his eyes, Vincent slowly shook his head and waggled a finger at the big man. "This is where you're wrong. The pathetic failure being made an example of in this particular instance is not me." Slowly he stopped waggling his finger and straightened it out in an accusatory gesture. "It's you."

His leg came up so fast that the onlookers could barely track the blow. The big man took the kick straight to the chin. It hit him so hard that all six and a half feet of him was lifted straight off of the ground for an instant before he collapsed heavily backwards.

Vincent slowly lowered his leg and took a careful pair of steps forward. "Boasting pure physical brawn at the expense of any intellect whatsoever is not an asset to a Turk," he said. "You have done nothing but strongarm your way through all of your assignments where subtler and less costly solutions could be found."

Recovering from the blow to his chin, the big man gave a howl and leapt to his feet, charging Vincent to try to take him down with a tackle. Vincent whirled out of the way and delivered a lightning-fast blow to the man's neck. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

"Also," Vincent added, "you should gauge your foe's true strength before boasting about your own. If you were the strongest member of the organization, then we wouldn't deserve the name of the Turks." He looked up at the line of recruits and said, "That will be all."

* * *

"There were easier ways of dismissing him," Vincent argued. "Or he could have been transferred to a special ops unit, something more suited to his particular field."

President Shin-Ra ran a hand through his slicked-back blonde hair and grinned, displaying perfect teeth that were just starting to show the beginnings of permanent nicotine staining. "But we don't need any more combat specialists, and this provided us with an opportunity to teach the hopefuls a lesson they won't soon forget."

Verdot, an up-and-comer in the chain of command, moved to stand slightly closer to the president's desk and said, "I agree with President Shin-Ra, Mr. Valentine. I think this was extremely effective."

Vincent glowered at both of them and started pacing the length of the president's spacious office. "But this doesn't encourage them, it just frightens them. Putting fear into someone is fine, but where is the accompanying reassurance that they have more to look forward to than what happened to the so-called 'strongest in the unit?'"

There was a snicking sound as the president put a cigar through his gold-plated cutter. Verdot caught the falling tip out of midair with the same hand in which he proffered a light. The president lowered his cigar to the flame, took a few experimental puffs, and then settled back into his chair. "Look, Vincent, I'm not sure why you're having qualms about this. All we did was have you kill two birds with one stone – let this guy go and put the fear of god into the recruits. He'll go find some mercenary work or something and die young, and the new meat will all step a bit more lightly around you. I'm not seeing the problem."

"It's –" Vincent's face contorted as he struggled for the words – "not right."

The president expelled a massive cloud of smoke as well as a deep laugh. "I can't believe I'm hearing this from you. Vincent 'Cerberus' Valentine is getting cold feet? You shot up an entire board of directors to get to the one guy who was going to leak our reactor plans to the opposition, and now you're whining to me about disciplining a moron and scaring the new blood. I gave you that nickname because you were Shin-Ra's guard dog, but apparently someone's gone and neutered you without me realizing it."

Vincent bristled. "I didn't come in here to get old history thrown in my face."

With a sigh, the president made a quick shooing motion at him. "Enough, enough. If it'll stop your whining, I'll take your advice into account the next time we decide to fire someone."

"That's all I wanted to hear." Vincent strode out of the president's office and made an effort not to slam the door behind him.

The observer followed him down a series of hallways until Vincent arrived at his own office. He stepped inside and collapsed into his chair, running a hand down his face as he did so. Instinctively, Vincent checked the calendar for the current date and then stared at the letter that had been sitting on his desk for the past week. The date on the letter was from several months ago. The delay had been necessary to preserve operational security until such time as the operation was suspended or he qualified as needs-to-know.

He sat back and stared at the ceiling, while the observer looked at the letter on his desk. It informed Vincent that Grimoire Valentine had been killed during an experiment.

Finally Vincent sat up, pulled out a pen, and signed the form he'd been provided saying that yes, he would like to be reassigned to guard duty at the think-tank in Nibelheim. He needed a change.

* * *

Vincent swallowed and instinctively tightened his grip on Yuffie's hand.

They had come back down here, at her insistence. She had said that she needed to figure out how he had managed to expel all his memories from his body, and why they had taken on this form, here – and she had also said that he apparently couldn't come with her.

It was true. The darkness that was evidently the manifestation of his memories shied away from him, as though unable to touch him. By contrast, it clung to Yuffie like iron filings skittering towards a magnet.

"Whatever happens," she had said, "don't let go of my hand."

After they had reentered the coffin room, Yuffie had closed her eyes and stood very still. It suddenly seemed as though she was infinitely far away, that Vincent was staring at her through a telescope as she stood on a distant shore that he could not get to.

He kept his grip on her hand. It had been only a few minutes, but a feeling of dread was mounting in his gut. How this was going to help her he had no idea, but she had asked him to do it, and he wasn't about to argue.

Not with the woman who was putting her own mind at risk to retrieve his.

* * *

"This isn't your first sin."

The voice sounded like jagged metal on metal, low and grating. It also had a terribly insidious quality to it, making it sound reasonable and intelligent despite its horrible nature. As he lay in the coffin, Vincent could hear it, and as the observer lay in the coffin next to him she could hear it as well.

"All those people. What were their crimes, hmm? I'm sure many of them committed some major offenses, but just as many were guilty of nothing but not seeing eye-to-eye with Shin-Ra. Those scientists who tried to defect. The workers who threatened to get the union to order a strike." The voice paused, and if the silence had been made manifest it would have appeared as a knowing smile. "The children of that one engineer who had been stealing company secrets."

Vincent twitched in his hibernation.

"You remember the children, don't you? You had just crushed their father's skull in against their mantelpiece and they had come down from their bedroom because they heard the struggle. You couldn't let them know your face. Your choice was quite clear."

An expression of pain rooted itself in the gunman's features. His closed eyes squeezed shut even tighter, his brow furrowed, and his mouth contorted into a grimace. The observer could see it even in the total darkness of the coffin.

"You were very merciful – you made it quick. A bullet in the head and then two in the heart for each of them. You thought you were doing them a favor, didn't you? How laughable. How hypocritical for you to feel regret about Lucrecia when she's merely the last in a very long line of people that you've hurt."

A face was almost visible in the blackness: Vincent's, but drastically altered, with glowing yellow eyes and fangs. "You could put an end to this. Even in this body you could kill yourself. A big enough explosion, a hot enough fire… Perhaps it would make up, in some amount, for everything you've done.

"You never did understand death until it happened to your father. Everything that makes a person who they are – all their quirks, their unique traits, their individuality itself – they all vanish. What's left is a husk, an empty shell with a face that it doesn't know as its own. You look at it and see the person you used to know, but instinctively recognize that it's not them, that it's something else entirely.

"Everything they did in life becomes academic. Whatever wrongs they committed, whatever their sins… Washed away like leaves in a current. Everyone would eventually forget. You could take that path. You could make it all go away, you could reduce yourself to that shell with someone else's face."

Vincent's lips parted in his sleep and he breathed a single word. "No."

Chaos snarled and its presence suddenly receded – but it was not gone. It would not be gone for decades yet.

* * *

"I hate this, Vincent."

The observer felt her stomach do a flip. She didn't want to see this.

Vincent looked up at Yuffie from where he sat on her bed. She was pacing the length of her bedroom while he sat there, immobile, not sure what to say and afraid to try in any event.

"How many times have we done this, now? I invite you over for a drink, even though you can't really get drunk, and we talk, and then when I get to a certain point I start trying to make out with you, and it's like kissing a pillow, and then you tell me you don't think you can do this."

"I don't keep count," Vincent said quietly.

"I don't, either, because I'm usually too tipsy to think of it." The ninja-girl turned on her heel and walked right up to Vincent, bending down to bring herself nose-to-nose with him. "This is where you gotta show me that you're not just stringing me along, Vincent. I'm tired of trying and trying and not getting anywhere. Do you want me?"

Vincent swallowed and looked at the floor, unsure of what he should say. Yes, he did want her. He wanted her more than he'd wanted anything in a very long time. He wanted her more than he wanted absolution, more than he wanted to forget everything he'd done, more than he wanted to be able to truly move on from the sins that weighed him down.

She took the initiative and obviously decided to interpret his silence as a "yes." It was a questionable way of looking at it, but he couldn't blame her for wanting to see it that way. He stiffened as she pressed her mouth against his and forced her tongue between his teeth, then instinctively let himself relax and return the kiss.

Yuffie pressed herself harder against him, climbing onto the bed and breaking the kiss long enough to force him onto his back so she could straddle him and start sucking at his neck. He felt a low, pleased growl form in his throat, and Yuffie worked her way up to his ear, running the tip of her tongue around his lobe in a maddeningly arousing fashion. At the same time she grabbed his hands – he had shucked his gauntlet as soon as she had started getting touchy earlier – and pressed them earnestly against her chest. She was not the most endowed of women, but Vincent could feel her erect nipples through the thin material of her shirt, and he let himself give in and experimentally tweak them, eliciting a mewl of satisfaction from her. She switched her attentions with her mouth back to his own, while her hands wandered beneath the hem of his shirt and ran along his abdomen before reversing their course and undoing his pants.

Slowly, Yuffie started to slide back off of him, clearly intent on dropping to the floor and taking his pants off there. He opened his eyes and looked down the length of his body at her receding face, which bore an extremely knowing grin. A wave of déjà vu hit him and his expression slid into shock.

The observer finally realized what had happened in that pivotal moment, seeing what Vincent saw. He was in a hotel, a well-to-do-one with a large, plush bed and a fantastic view of the nearby Corel Mountains. There was another woman sliding off of him, her face sporting the same grin. She was young, pretty, with green eyes and blonde hair.

Her name was not particularly important. All that mattered was that she liked making pillow talk with Shin-Ra employees about the upcoming reactor project and then selling her findings to the highest bidder. There was a flash, and the scene moved to the bathroom, where Vincent held the woman's head under the water of the bath she had run. He held her there until a minute after the bubbles stopped issuing from her mouth and nose and her limbs stopped thrashing.

"You weren't even that good," Vincent muttered as he finally let go of what used to be a woman and started toweling off his soaked forearms.

They were suddenly back in Yuffie's bedroom. Vincent hoarsely screamed "NO!" and threw Yuffie off of him before leaping to his feet and fleeing the room.

* * *

Another few minutes had passed, still with no visible change in Yuffie's condition. She continued to remain stock-still, breathing very shallowly, eyes closed, gripping Vincent's hand as the darkness swirled around her.

Vincent swallowed. He had told her that if she didn't come back in fifteen minutes from wherever the darkness took her he would take her out of the mansion again and not consider coming back. This was dangerous, and it wasn't right that she was the only one taking the risk.

When it came down to it, if the choice was between remaining an effective John Doe for the rest of his life and recovering his identity at the possible cost of Yuffie's mind, Vincent was absolutely sure he would choose the former. There was no doubt in his mind.

He loved her, after all.

* * *

"I can't escape it," Vincent said to the woman in the crystal formation. "It's not possible. No matter how hard I try to put what I've done behind me, to make up for my sins, they won't leave me. I've stained my hands with too much blood. I've done far too many horrible things."

Lucrecia said nothing, and the observer was unsure whether the woman had even heard Vincent. The gunman kept going, pacing back and forth in the waterfall cave like a caged animal. "The only way that I can possibly atone for what I've done and put my mistakes behind me is my death – but what does death accomplish? I've lost count of the people I've killed and this is what it's brought me. Taking my own life won't change anything." He cupped his face in his hands, the most distressed that the observer had ever seen him. "I try to forget, and continue to live, but it all continues to come back, and I end up here, talking to you…"

There was a sound, as though a glimmer of light had been made into a noise, and it slowly rose into an ephemeral voice – Lucrecia's voice. "Vincent… I can help you."

Vincent's head whipped around and he stared at Lucrecia. "What?"

"You know… of my modifications. The JENOVA cells inside me. You know the power JENOVA cells have over the mind, Vincent. Their power over thought… and memory."

"What are you saying?"

"I can remove your past. Put it… away. Elsewhere. Where it won't come and ambush you when you're not looking for it."

Vincent walked up to the crystal formation, pressed his hands against it. "You can do this?"

"I cannot tell you what will happen afterwards… but yes. I can."

He bit at his lip and his expression fell. "But is this any different from running away, from killing myself?"

"You will not be dead. You will not be who you used to be, but you will be alive – alive, and able to make the best of your new life… and able to be with the people in it."

Vincent looked at Lucrecia again. "You know about Yuffie."

Lucrecia answered his unvoiced question. "By all rights I should not even be alive. I am not, in some senses. How could I object to your wanting to live and move beyond me when I never asked for your love to begin with? If by doing this thing I can make up in some small part the debt I owe you and your father…"

Indecision written on his face, Vincent bowed his head for a long moment.

Then his expression hardened into resolve. "Do it!" He slammed his head as hard as he could into the crystal formation, hitting with a sickening crack. There was a flash of light, and the cave swirled away into nothing.


	5. V: The End

"It was Lucrecia!" Yuffie exclaimed.

Vincent started as Yuffie snapped out of her reverie and tightened her grip on his hand. "What?" he asked. "Who?"

"An… old friend of yours. She's special, she has superhuman powers. Kind of. At any rate, you asked her to take away your memories. Obviously she did, and the way she did it caused them to appear here like this." Yuffie waved at the writhing darkness surrounding them. "Do you remember anything about JENOVA?"

"Just scattered, cold technical details," Vincent replied. "Vague things about cells and experiments… on human beings."

"She must have made the cells in her absorb your memories – not just read them, but bleed them out of you like a sponge being squeezed dry. And then…"

"And then the memories took root."

The voice was not Vincent's. The darkness receded from around them. Both Vincent and Yuffie felt the hairs on the backs of their necks rise, and they whirled to see Hojo standing behind them, darkness swirling about him. A vicious sneer was plastered on his face.

"How are you doing this?" Yuffie demanded. "You're not real!"

Hojo gave a great, wheezing laugh. "You sound so sure of yourself, Yuffie! Simply because I am formed out of pure memory, I am not real? You thought I was some kind of phantasmagoric creature, with form only in that poor fool's appropriated memories? Just because I am a simulacrum of Hojo and not Hojo himself, you think I am not just as dangerous?"

He made a dismissive swiping motion with one of his arms, and the darkness reacted, undulating and pulsing with eerie life. "The problem with JENOVA cells is that they need a unifying consciousness to control them. The will of Sephiroth, Hojo's son, was absolutely indomitable, and as such he controlled the cells and his clones as though they were all extensions of himself.

"Lucrecia Crescent, however, was no Sephiroth. The stupid woman was weak, pitiable, even pathetic – there was no way she could compete for control of the cells within her body once this consciousness of mine was formed."

Yuffie's eyes narrowed and she slowly began to reach for the boomerang-shuriken slung across her back. "What do you mean, 'was'?"

Hojo's sneer widened, and his eyes blazed with insane glee. "Imagine your own body, Yuffie Kisaragi. You know about red blood cells, I imagine – I'm sure you made top marks in your science class."

"Get to the damn point!" Yuffie snarled.

"Imagine if every red blood cell in your body suddenly decided that it would prefer to go out into the world and find a new career. Now imagine that they were also all very rude and didn't take sensible routes out into the air such as capillaries and other convenient paths through the epidermis, allowing you to merely die of suffocation. They just barged their way out, as fast as they could, and didn't bother to clean up after themselves." His gaze traveled to Vincent. "Even if you had your memories," he cackled, "I doubt you would recognize what's now in that mako formation."

Yuffie pounced, springing forward and whirling her shuriken around her head, cutting cleanly through Hojo's neck and landing behind him. Vincent drew Cerberus and put a triple round through Hojo's forehead in the same moment.

"That's a bit of an overreaction for a woman that you, Yuffie, don't care about, and that you, Vincent, don't even remember," Hojo hissed. His head, rather than flying off of his shoulders from Yuffie's cut and Vincent's bullets, stayed where it was, darkness leaking for the massive entry and exit wounds and the cut through its neck.

"Shut the HELL UP!" Yuffie spat at him, pivoting on her heel and whirling into a dazzling multistrike array that sliced neatly through every one of Hojo's extremities and his stomach in the space of a second. Vincent, wary of hitting her with stray fire, concentrated his efforts on Hojo's head, blowing what was left of it clean away.

"You just don't understand, do you?" Hojo's voice cackled eerily, emanating from within the leaking mass that was his body. "Before, when Hojo injected himself with JENOVA cells to try to fight you, they were still under the control of Sephiroth, and he had to expend too much of his willpower to fight off the influence of his own son to control the metamorphoses. Now that I've wrested control of these cells from Lucrecia, you don't have a chance in the world!"

His form collapsed into a swirling cloud of writhing blackness as big as a man, which then doubled in size when the rest of the floating clusters of JENOVA cells retreated into it. Vincent dodged around it and grabbed Yuffie, spiriting her out of the coffin room just as a good portion of the inky mass solidified into a sharp protrusion that lashed out and pierced deep into the stone where she had been standing.

"This is bad," Vincent observed.

"No shit!" Yuffie growled, wriggling out of his grasp and beginning to run on her own. "I mean, we've fought JENOVA before – not that you'd remember – but Sephiroth always had them take on this one weird, alien form. There's no telling what that Hojo fake can do!"

A swirling black mass erupted out of the coffin room, shredding the doorframe in its efforts to evacuate itself, and tore down the corridor after them. Yuffie turned, focused on the Fire materia bonded to her arm, and sent a ball of flame screaming into the morass before continuing to retreat. The fireball exploded into a cloud of smoke, and the cloud gave only a brief pause to recover before resuming the chase.

"How did we beat JENOVA before?" Vincent demanded.

"We just wailed on it over and over until it died!" Yuffie replied. "I mean, it's a shapeshifting, regenerating monster, but it has its limitations just like us. It takes energy to shrug off wounds and spew attacks – it just has a lot of energy to spare."

Vincent fired backwards without bothering to look, emptying the rest of Cerberus's clip with perfect accuracy into one spot in the JENOVA mass. It didn't slow down, noticing the triple rounds even less than it had the fireball. "It's faster than us, deadlier than us, and certainly won't run out of stamina before we will. We need to hit it with a big attack, make its eyes really water, to buy us some time to get out of here."

They crossed the threshold into the spiral staircase a moment later, and Yuffie came to a halt, lifting her boomerang-shuriken above her head and closing her eyes. Vincent felt the air stir as she compressed a massive amount of spirit energy into her weapon before turning and unloading it into the JENOVA mass in the form of a piercing spear of blinding light.

There was an audible screech inside both their minds, and Vincent felt his vision clear abnormally fast after the attack – no doubt something to do with this strange body of his. The JENOVA mass had exploded. Where an angry cloud of death had been there was a fine black mist and boiling puddles of midnight-colored ichor.

Yuffie began to fall, and Vincent caught her without thinking, cradling her small form as she collapsed limply backwards. She blinked and forced herself unsteadily to her feet, slinging her weapon onto her back. "Never did that quite that fast before. Let's get the hell out of here while it's still in disgusting bits."

Vincent nodded and took one last look before he began to retreat up the stairs. The JENOVA cells were already recombining. The puddles were no longer boiling, and the mist was coalescing into a solid form. By his estimation, Vincent figured that they only had a minute to clear the mansion before the Hojo simulacrum would be after them again.

"That certainly made his eyes water," he remarked on the way up.

"Freak hasn't got eyes," Yuffie responded. "No eyes, organs, weak spots… the only way to kill him is to pound on him over and over again, and I don't have another All Creation in me. Not without a much longer charge-up time, and he wouldn't let me get it off."

"He must have some kind of weakness," Vincent said. They cleared the staircase and started pounding towards the front of the mansion. "Elemental vulnerability, something!"

"Vincent, we're fighting a mass of pure, concentrated death. Death doesn't care what you hit it with."

They made it to the front of the mansion without incident and charged down the winding stairway to the first floor. Vincent body-slammed the doors open, and they emerged out into the dusk, the sun freshly set but still giving off the slightest bit of distant light. The stars were just beginning to glimmer in the twilight sky.

"When he invaded your mind, how do you think he did it?" Vincent asked as they continued to run. "If he's just a mass of JENOVA cells that he's taken control of, then he had to have been telepathically overwhelming you with their unique abilities to make you see and hear what he wanted you to. But you snapped out of it once I got you outside – he must only be able to do it when he's got at least some direct contact."

"Yeah, and?" Yuffie asked. "I don't see how this helps."

"When we went back in, you were in a different mindset. You wanted to try to access my memories, not flee from them. I doubt the simulacrum just decided to let you have a look around – you overcame him, at least for a little while. That means two things. One, JENOVA telepathy is a two-way street. Two…"

Yuffie's eyes widened and she grinned in realization. "That must be the reason he chose me to attack at first! He was afraid that if he targeted you, you might overwhelm him from square one. His strategy was to keep me scared and confused long enough to break down my mind, but you got me away from him, and the second time around I was stronger."

"He knows he can't beat you – either of us – through will alone any longer," Vincent said. "That's why he's attacking us out here, in a setting where he has a natural advantage. We have to take the fight to him on his own ground, inside my memories."

"Right!" Yuffie ground to a halt and whipped her boomerang-shuriken off of her back again, orienting herself towards the mansion. They had put a fair bit of distance between it and themselves, but neither of them had any thoughts of closing with the place again. "All we have to do is wait for him to come barging out that door, and when he tries to attack us, we grab him – some part of him – and force our way in."

Vincent shucked his gauntlet, removed the leather sleeve on his left arm, and pulled the glove off of his right hand before drawing and reloading Cerberus. "Sounds like a plan."

They stood ready for a full minute before it occurred to either of them that something might be wrong. "It shouldn't be taking him this long to reconstitute himself," Vincent muttered.

"Maybe I hit him harder than we thought," Yuffie said, her tone brightening a bit. "Maybe –"

There was the sound of the air being ripped apart in the wake of something's passage, and Yuffie collapsed to the ground in midsentence.

Vincent gaped for a full half-second before he could summon the presence of mind to rush over to her side. There was a massive, quickly purpling bruise on the side of her head, and blood was oozing from her nostrils. Her pulse was steady, but she was clearly unconscious and probably concussed. She had been taken down in one clean hit, and Vincent had no idea how.

He swept the area for signs of the simulacrum but saw nothing obvious. A second sweep again revealed nothing, but a third one made him hesitate and stop to look at something lying on the ground a few feet from Yuffie. Still in a crouch, Cerberus ready in his right hand, Vincent scuttled over and picked up what looked at first to be a palm-sized, very smooth rock.

A moment's inspection revealed that it couldn't be a rock. No rock was midnight black, and no rock was ever shaped into a perfect sphere.

Instantly Vincent pieced together what had happened. His enhanced hearing picked up the slightest puff of air from behind him, and he instantly swung Cerberus around and fired blindly into the space between him and the mansion. His instinctive aim was true, and he whirled just in time to see the remnants of the shattered projectile composed of hardened JENOVA cells scatter to the earth.

His surprise attack foiled, the Hojo simulacrum revealed itself. A black cloud boiled out of the very ground in front of the mansion and coalesced into the familiar morass, which had been reduced a bit in size by Yuffie's attack but did not look that much worse for the wear.

The front of it bubbled and grotesquely shifted, and out of the morass emerged a skull, which was quickly covered by muscle and ligaments, followed by flesh and hair. Hojo's head stared out of the mass of death and grinned at Vincent.

"Give up, Vincent, and I'll make this quick and painless. Your friend is lucky she's not dead – I forgot to adjust for the wind and the projectile was nudged just the slightest bit off course. I won't make the same mistake again." Underneath his head the same bubbling started at five different points in the mass. The cells hardened into palm-sized, perfect spheres, and then were absorbed back inside, ready to be discharged. "You can't dodge and shoot down them all."

Vincent closed his eyes and visualized trajectories. If he were in Hojo's position, he would fire the projectiles in any number of random trajectories within the target's range of movement. Their speed meant that there would be no way to escape.

There were no certainties to deal with about whether or not he could dodge. He would just have to try. The one certainty that he could depend on was that this Hojo person hated him.

Opening his eyes, Vincent smirked and tapped his forehead. "Put them here, Hojo," he said. "If you can."

Hojo's expression changed from a grin to a twitching, furious snarl, and he howled, a horrible, preternatural sound that no human throat could have produced. It rose inexorably in pitch, up, up, up –

Vincent waited until a split second before he knew that the sound would rupture his eardrums and then snapped Cerberus up and fired twice, then dove forward after the bullets.

The howl ceased and Hojo acted on a hair-trigger reflex, exploding the projectiles out of his body – all on a direct collision course for where Vincent's forehead should be, just as the gunman had intended. Three of them screamed through empty air, and the two that would have hit Vincent before he could fall to the ground ran straight into his bullets and were torn apart. He felt their shrapnel rip into him as he hit the dirt and rolled, but he ignored the pain and came up running only a few feet from Hojo. The simulacrum screamed and clenched a part of its mass before lancing another sharp protrusion out at Vincent's chest, but he saw the blow coming and twisted out of the way.

In the next instant, he plunged his ungloved left arm elbow-deep into the JENOVA mass. It was cold, cold as ice, and Vincent felt needle pains shoot through his arm and into his body, but in the same moment he felt a presence in his mind, a pathway to the twisted web of his memories.

"This is the end, Hojo!" he snarled and launched his mind into the void.

* * *

For the first time in what felt like a very long time, Vincent Valentine woke up.

He was in a cold, dark place, and his head hurt, a terrible, throbbing pain that seemed to keep time with his pulse. He clutched at his head and felt blood seeping through his hair and staining his fingers.

Trying to focus his vision, Vincent sat up and realized where he was. The sound of rushing water echoed behind him, and the floor was flat and smooth. He was in Lucrecia's waterfall cave.

Something was wrong. The cave was never dark – the mako formation that Lucrecia was encased in always provided a constant, soft glow. Vincent turned and looked at the formation and recoiled at what he saw.

The crystal had been severely cracked – he had done that with his head, he thought – and the twisted remains of what had been inside were slowly leaking bits of unidentifiable fluid through the breach. The droplets hit the floor of the cave with a steady dripping sound, and Vincent felt his stomach heave at the sight of what was left of Lucrecia.

He remembered who she was, he realized. He knew this place, and who he was, and his friends –

"But you're not out of trouble yet," came a hissing, familiar voice. "Oh, no, Vincent Valentine, you are not safe. Not by a long shot."

Vincent turned to see a man silhouetted in the entrance to the cave. "Hojo."

"If you insist on calling me that, fine," the simulacrum sneered. "Hojo it is."

"At first, waking up, I thought it might have all been a dream or a nightmare." His own voice seemed distant, echoing. "But Lucrecia… you being here…"

"No, what happened was real. This is real. You remember things because I've let you remember them, Vincent. Believe it or not, I am still in control here." Hojo grinned and walked over to Vincent, adjusting his glasses as he did so. "Your analysis of the two-way nature of JENOVA telepathy, even when robbed of your memories of all your experiences with the entity, was superb. I listened to every word."

"It was a trick," Vincent growled. "Yuffie's attack didn't hurt you that much. You just made it look that way, and then you seeped up through the ground to the topsoil and waited for your opportunity."

"You continue to amaze me, Vincent," Hojo sighed. "What a waste of acumen, really. The both of you were right about everything. Yuffie Kisaragi is a formidable opponent, both in the real world and in the mental arena. Once she was no longer off-guard, I could not resist her probing without risking permanent damage to my own consciousness, so I let her see what she needed.

"You, however, are not Yuffie Kisaragi."

"It's my memories," Vincent snarled at him. "It's my head, Hojo. Why are you more in control of it than I am?"

Hojo snapped his fingers and Vincent felt a tearing, ripping sensation in his head. He gave a short scream and staggered backwards, clutching at his head again. The sensation stopped as quickly as it had begun, and he realized that he had forgotten things. What they were, he had no idea, but he knew it had happened.

"I've always been more in control of your head than you, you fool!" Hojo cackled. "Of course, I only took form after Hojo's idiot assistant sucked the memories that comprise me from your brain, but I have always been there in your mind. Tormenting you. Making you doubt yourself and others. Reminding you of your sins and failures. Berating you. Rotting you from the inside."

Vincent stared at him. "You don't just refer to Hojo as a different person because you're a simulacrum of him. He was who I must have thought I hated the most, so my memories of him were naturally shaped into your consciousness. But you're not him, you're not even a simulacrum of him."

Hojo gave him a thin smile, and then he was no longer Hojo. Vincent stared in open shock at his own face, sneering at him.

"Oh, I certainly started as a simulacrum of Hojo," the other Vincent said. "But he was a shallow little man, and as much as you may have hated him, there was so much more that I could be. I kept him because of the reaction he provoked from Yuffie and from you, but I haven't been him since I ripped my way out of Lucrecia Crescent."

He pointed a golden talon at Vincent, who realized that he was also wearing his gauntlet, and said, "The structure of your own mind, twisted by cohabiting it with Chaos and other dark entities, interacted with the inherent malevolence of the JENOVA cells used to absorb your memories. If a simulacrum of Hojo could be realized by simply using your memories of him, why stop at memories of people? Why not use memories of things you've done, things you've thought of doing, things you've despaired over and wished you could forget?"

The false Vincent began to pace circles around the real one, his voice rising in its manic tone as he spoke. "Hojo was the instigator of what you felt was your greatest sin, but he was only the surface villain. Who was the one really at fault? It was your sin, after all. Why could Yuffie Kisaragi, who has never been inside your mind, so easily overcome me, when you, who have lived in its contours your entire life, cannot even put up a fight?" He stopped and literally screamed into Vincent's ear, "DO YOU KNOW WHY, VINCENT VALENTINE?"

Vincent looked at the reflection of himself and said, "You are my guilt."

His double gave him a demonic grin. "Very clever, Vincent! I am the manifestation of all your failures, all your guilt and self-loathing and all your hubris, brought to life through the consciousnesses of those you know. You've fought with me for the better part of your life and you never could overcome me even when I had no form or substance like I do now. I am what made you see the past where you should see the present, what made you see the drowned prostitute instead of the person right in front of you. And do you know what else, Vincent Valentine? I like being here. I plan to go on living for a very, very long time."

"What kind of a life can you possibly lead?" Vincent demanded. "You're the literal manifestation of everything that I hated about myself. There is nothing positive in you, nothing but negative force. What do you intend to do?"

"Why, it's quite simple," his double replied. "Since I was ripped from your mind and fused with these JENOVA cells, I've gestated and grown and become aware, and I've realized that you're right. As much as I wish otherwise, I'm not my own independent person. I am the guilt of Vincent Valentine, I am the failures of Vincent Valentine. If there is no longer a Vincent Valentine, then I am the guilt and the failures of nothing at all. I need you, Vincent. So I'm going to restore your memories to you – put them all back in your mind, make you remember who you are. I'm going to empty these JENOVA cells of everything that is you and let them dry up and die.

"And I'm going to hitch a ride with those memories, Vincent. I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing all this time, but now I'll take more of an active role. Instead of waiting for you to fail and sin and then lashing you mercilessly for it, I'm going to make you fail and I'm going to make you sin." The double raked a talon down Vincent's face, and he recoiled in pain, blood oozing from the wound. "How I enjoy punishing you for your shortcomings, Vincent. How I enjoy causing you grief!"

Vincent wasn't entirely sure how it happened. In one moment he was clutching at his lacerated cheek, his head throbbing even worse and his mouth tasting of blood and animal fear, and in the next his pain faded and he felt a cool confidence wash over him.

That next moment also saw his double's head get neatly lobbed off by a spinning boomerang-shuriken. The weapon arced gracefully around and landed neatly in the hand of Yuffie Kisaragi, who sported a nasty head injury but otherwise looked very much alive and angry.

"Screw you," Yuffie said.

Even though its head was lying on the floor, the body of Vincent's doubled whirled to face Yuffie, while the head's expression shifted to one of rage. "How did you get here?" it demanded. "You were unconscious!"

"Only for a little bit," Yuffie said with a smirk. "I came to just about the time when Vincent shoved his arm into the nasty gunk and then just kind of went slack. Took me a couple seconds to start walking straight again, but then I came right over here and stuck my own arm in too."

"Useless effort!" the double roared. "Even if you can overcome me because of who you are, I have his body. I'll be back in his mind, just as it should be, and there won't be a single thing you can do about it."

"Maybe not," Yuffie admitted, "but it's not my mind, is it? It's up to Vincent." She looked at him and said, "You know me, Vincent. You know I wouldn't lie to you. Whatever this thing is, whether or not it's really your guilt or some shit like that, it doesn't matter. It's your mind, your head, your decision. You decide whether or not you feel guilty, you decide whether or not you can forgive yourself. I mean, sure, you're going to feel bad about stuff – that's life. But moving past that and carrying on, or letting it rule you forever… that's up to you.

"Mister creepy-shadow-you is making it out like you have no choice in the matter, but this is all up to you. You can take back your memories – all of them – and accept that you did some bad stuff back in the day, and recognize that it's no longer who you are and doesn't define you. You can decide not to take them back and never remember who you were or what you did, and knowing what that was, I honestly wouldn't blame you. I've never blamed you. So I understand, whatever path you choose, and I support it. After all… well, it's kind of obvious by this point, but what the hell. I love you, Vincent."

The body of Vincent's double applauded mechanically, like a marionette with twisted strings, while the head laughed coldly. "A truly stirring speech, Yuffie, but ultimately futile! This fool has let me rule him for decades now, and he's not about to so easily change his ways. Not for you, not for himself, not for anything!"

His declaration faded into echoing silence and his expression changed from triumphant to confused. Yuffie wasn't even looking at him – she was looking past him, at Vincent. The body picked up the head and reattached it to its shoulders so it could see why she was ignoring it.

Vincent stood silently, eyes closed, mouth curved into a wistful smile. Twin trails of moisture glistened on his face, and he opened his eyes to gaze into Yuffie's.

"I love you too."

"This is ridiculous!" his double sneered. "Is the healing power of love going to overcome me, Vincent? You should know better than to put faith in such disgusting tripe!"

Vincent shrugged. "I don't believe in that. I do believe, however, that Yuffie is right, and love is why I'm going to do this."

Before his double could open his mouth to ask what, Vincent sprang forward and sank his gauntlet straight into his mirror image's face. His golden talons pierced straight through flesh and bone and lodged deep in his enemy's skull.

The double made a choking, gurgling noise that might have been surprise, but that was cut off quickly enough when Vincent savagely sank the stabbing point of one of his boots into the double's gut and pried his gauntlet free. He then grabbed his double by its bleeding head and dragged it over to the dark and silent crystal formation.

"Goodbye," he said.

Vincent grabbed his double by the back of his skull and crushed its head into the crystal, slamming it viciously against the fractured material. The sound of flesh being pulverized and bone cracking echoed loudly in the cave, and that was only the beginning. Vincent pulled his double back and slammed its head into the formation over and over again, the horrible sounds of wet crunching very loud in the confined space.

Yuffie watched, halfway between proud and horrified. The pummeling went on and on, and slowly she realized that the crunching was punctuating a lower, constant sound in the background. She had no idea what it was until she caught a glimpse of Vincent's face.

He was sobbing.

Tears rolled down Vincent's cheeks as he blindly crushed his double's head into the crystal over and over. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut and his face was contorted into a grimace, and with each vicious smash he sobbed piteously.

He didn't stop until after he had to shift his grip to the double's spinal column for lack of a skull to hold onto. Vincent finally let the now very dead double drop to the ground and collapsed to his knees in a pool of blood and shattered bone, his entire body heaving from the sobs that were wracking him.

Yuffie walked up to him and tentatively put a hand on his shoulder. She felt him stiffen and then his sobs slowly subsided to the point where he could get to his feet and turn to face her.

She had never seen his eyes red. She pulled him into an embrace, his lanky frame seeming light and frail. "It's okay," she murmured. "It's okay."

Yuffie felt the ground shift. The waterfall cave faded out, and they were in front of the Shin-Ra mansion again, standing over a pile of dead JENOVA cells.

They were in one another's arms in the next second and kissing fiercely in the one after that. Yuffie luxuriated in the feeling, ignoring the pounding headache assailing her senses and enjoying the moment.

A minute later they broke for air, and Yuffie pulled away just the slightest bit to get a good look at him. She realized that there was something different in his eyes, something familiar.

Vincent Valentine, the real Vincent Valentine, smiled wanly at her, his face still wet from tears. "Can we go home now?" he asked.

Yuffie nodded. "Yeah, Vincent.

"We can go home now."

**In Memoriam**

**Fin**


End file.
